Last week, after the governors of Mississippi and Texas announced an end their states’ mask-wearing mandates and that businesses could open at full capacity, President Joe Biden told reporters that such rollbacks are a “big mistake" and that "The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking.” His “Neanderthal” comment in particular was seized on by a slew of GOP politicians who sought to turn the president’s phrasing from a criticism of bad public health decisions by elected leaders into a wholesale attack on all Republican voters. Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, gave a master class in misdirection through high dudgeon, tweeting that “Mississippians don't need handlers. As numbers drop, they can assess their choices and listen to experts. I guess I just think we should trust Americans, not insult them.”
Among other reasons, the kerfluffle was notable because it was a rare instance of Joe Biden seeming to throw culture war shade in the way his predecessor did on a near-hourly basis. But where Donald Trump always clearly intended to divide Americans, it’s a huge stretch to claim that Biden was effectively blowing up his claims to unify America, as many Republicans indeed argued. The truth of Biden’s approach is far closer to what Ezra Klein described last week about Biden’s effort to turn down the temperature of American politics.
So why the “Neanderthal” remarks from Biden? An honest reading makes clear that the president was taking aim at the Republican leaders making premature and ill-advised decisions to relax coronavirus precautions, rather than attacking ordinary citizens. The president is on sound public health ground here, as health officials continue to advocate for the wearing of masks; for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last week that, “I understand the need to want to get back to normality, but you're only going to set yourself back if you just completely push aside the public health guidelines.”
I think it’s also safe to say that Biden’s language expressed a real personal outrage against the governors’ policies. Crucially, it’s an outrage that is incredibly well-founded, based not on a disagreement on something like tax policy or amount of stimulus needed to help the economy (as important as those are), but on basic matters of life and death. Governors who are prematurely declaring victory over the virus and signaling that basic health measures are no longer necessary are endangering the lives of their citizens, full stop.
It’s a complete red herring for GOP politicians to fall back on arguments that “personal responsibility,” not state laws, will save the day, and that states should trust people to make the right decisions. It is incredible at this late date that Republican leaders continue to pretend that mask mandates are simply about the choice about whether to protect’s oneself from the virus. The far more important role of masks is in fact to prevent spreading the virus to others. And so the discussion of personal freedom is completely perverted into a question as to whether a person is “free” to catch the virus, when the real question is whether the rest of us should be free from catching it. Without mask mandates, people can now enter businesses without masks in Texas and Mississippi, endangering not simply themselves but everyone they come into contact with. But it gets worse. People who choose not to wear masks are also increasing the odds of dangerous mutations in the virus that can make it more contagious and more deadly. This is bad enough for their own states, but of course the virus doesn’t recognize state, or national, borders. And yet these governors wold have us believe that they are only engaged in a discussion of freedom in their states.
It is harder to think of a more tendentious mis-definition of “freedom” than what we are hearing from governors like Mississippi’s Reeves or Texas’ Gregg Abbott.
It may seem counter-intuitive, given the bad-faith willingness of the GOP to twist the president’s words, but I would argue that Joe Biden’s language was not nearly harsh enough. Mask-wearing is such a tremendously easy way to slow the spread of the virus, imposing zero cost on citizens and bringing vast benefits. It’s not just bad policy to eliminate such state mandates — it’s outright murderous. More people will die than otherwise, for absolutely no good reason. Such relaxation is all the more contemptible as public health experts issue warnings that new strains of the virus may push the U.S. into a spike of Covid-19 cases.
It may prove over the long term that Biden’s general refusal to engage in culture war flash points is a winning strategy, but it’s deeply galling that on a matter of life and death, Biden and other Democrats are constrained from using the appropriate language to describe the actions of their political opponents.